A VIGIL.

IT is the vigil of Emerson. To-morrow (May 25, 1882) he will be seventy-nine years of age. I cannot bear to write "he would be." This day, gazing on a picture of Emerson's funeral, picking out from beneath their grey hairs faces of some with whom I have sat at his feet, there comes home to me the secret of that longing out of which were born myths of men that never died, of Yami and Arthur, of Enoch and Saint John. The love of a Madonna is in his own interpretation. "The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men because they want more time and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as we are with our experience, and transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants what we could of the wisdom of this. After we have found our depth there, and assimilated what we could of the wisdom of the new experience, transfer us to a new scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which we were too much immersed. In short, all our intellectual action not promises, but bestows a feeling of absolute existence. We are taken out of time and breathe a purer air."

Such duration did Emerson devise; but one source of the longing for immortality he could not know so fully as we who cannot leave his grave. It needed this night to bring out the star of that hope.

A

"I send you," a friend writes, "a sprig from the evergreen that bordered Emerson's grave as his coffin was lowered into it this afternoon. I dropped a piece in after the school children had covered the coffin with their tributes, and kept the rest, of which this is a part."

Is this bit of evergreen, already dust, all the Amen Nature can give to the faith of its greatest heart? Ye pines and oaks of Sleepy Hollow, awake! Wrestle, as Herakles for Alcestis, grapple with Death for your poet and lover! Search with every rootlet for the seed of that brain, and lift it again to upper air!

Alas! Nature has been faithless. He trusted her April smiles and she chilled him with death; and now she seems to contradict his living word, drawing those he taught to live in the present to find their paradise in the past he made so beautiful.

But the ground laurel on his grave and the whispering oaks and pines waving above it have sent abroad their message to those who with him have walked that sacred grove, saying, "What he has been to thee that shalt thou tell. Into the grave of memory shalt thou search and lift by what art thou canst every gracious word he gave thee, every thought he inspired, and all the beautiful life. thou didst witness, to its resurrection and life, that he may, through love, be as immortal as a mortal can be."

Once, as I walked with John Stuart Mill alone, he questioned me concerning Emerson and his influence on American youth. All I could tell him of Emerson was what he had been to me. When my story was told he said, "That is a thing to be written on a man's tomb." Emerson has a tomb in many homes. He has one in mine; and the inscription on it is here recorded for my fellow-pilgrims in life.

From this vigil beside the grave of Emerson, memory passes over the time of a generation, and across long stretches of sea and land, to a secret nook near my Virginian home, to whose crystal fount and flowers my

eighteenth spring carried a wintry heart. Near that wooded slope the Rappahannock spread silvery in the sunshine, placid after its falls foam-white in the distance, streaming past its margin of meadows to the peaceful homes and spires of Fredericksburg. Fresh from college, now from every career planned by parent or friend I had recoiled some indefinable impediment barred each usual path: the last shadow settled around me when the lawbook was closed to be opened no more. Utterly miserable, self-accused amid sorrowful faces, with no outlook but to be a fettered master of slaves, I was then wont to shun the world, with gun for apology, and pass the hours in this retreat. So came I on a day, and reclined on the grass, reading in a magazine casually brought. The laugh and chatter of negroes pushing their flat-boats loaded with grain, the song of birds, the sound of church-bells across the river, all smote upon a heart discordant with them, at discord with itself. Nature had no meaning, life no promise and no aim. Listlessly turning to the printed page, one sentence caught my eye and held it; one sentence quoted from Emerson, which changed my world and me.

All I

That

But

A sentence only! I do not repeat it: it might not bear to others what it bore to me: its searching subtle revelation defies any analysis I can make of its words. know is that it was the touch of flame I needed. day my gun was laid aside to be resumed no more. how crude I was! The nearest mould into which my new life could run was a Methodist itinerancy. A human aim had arisen; souls were to be saved; and in that work must begin my small "Wanderjahre." My horse was got ready : my Bible, filled with maternal inscriptions holy as its texts, was taken for compass in my wanderings; I only longed to add some book by Emerson. But the Index Expurgatorius of slavery had excluded Northern books so long and so well, that the bookseller in Fredericksburg offered me "Emerson's Arithmetic," and denied the existence of any

other Emerson. For a long time I had only my one sentence; but how large it grew!

My cousin and literary friend, John Moncure Daniel, was editor of the "Richmond Examiner," in which paper I was delighted by finding one day a long extract from one of Emerson's Essays. About that time Edgar A. Poe was lecturing at Richmond on Poetry, and my cousin supplemented his selections by printing Emerson's "Humble Bee." Poe had conceived a dislike of Emerson, and the severest criticism upon himself are his paragraphs about the man he most needed. I remember that restless face and demon-driven figure, and have felt that if he could only have appreciated the true teacher of his time, the career of that wanderer might have been less tragical.

Soon after leaving home for the charge assigned me by the Baltimore Methodist Conference, I obtained the first series of Emerson's Essays, and presently his other works. They were read, between my nineteenth and twentieth birthdays, on horseback, while travelling the roads and woods of a "circuit" in Maryland. I preached seven times in the week, and in some cases had to ride more than twenty miles to an appointment. But with Emerson for companion, my horse, walking the distance with reins on neck, arrived but too soon.

Presently the shadow cast by this light began to travel beside me. Strange that I should have been so longnearly a year unconscious of the abyss between what I was thinking and what I was doing! My congregations grew ominously still; elders shook their heads, and were on more anxious seats than the sinners; so I grew perplexed. One Sunday a pious lady awaited my descent from the pulpit and said, "Brother, you seemed to be preaching to us from another world." Then I preached

no more.

Having resigned my profession, I returned for a brief time to Virginia: there I was lonely, but still happy,

though not able to see my way very far. At this time I was thrilled by learning that a youth from the North-no doubt seeking health in our warmer climate-had died in our neighbourhood, and with his last words begged that his love should be conveyed to Emerson, "who," he said, "has done more for me than any other on earth." This message I undertook to forward, and did, but not at once, for I hoped to find out more about this wayfarer who had died so near a comrade without knowing it.

Of course I had written to Emerson. I was nineteen, alone with my new thoughts, and was seized with a longing to realise my master's existence. So I wrote my brief loveletter, and posted it with a feeling that it was addressed to some impersonal spirit, dwelling in a spiritual realm harmoniously called Concord, whom it would never reach. But-joy!-speedily came the response, read in sweet secrecy then, and how often since!

"CONCORD, MASS., 13th November 1851.

DEAR SIR,-I fear you will not be able, except at some chance auction, to obtain any set of the 'Dial.' In fact, smaller editions were printed of the later and latest numbers, which increases the difficulty.

"I am interested by your kind interest in my writings, but you have not let me sufficiently into your own habit of thought, to enable me to speak to it with much precision. But I believe what interests both you and me most of all things, and whether we know it or not, is the morals of intellect; in other words, that no man is worth his room in the world who is not commanded by a legitimate object of thought. The earth is full of frivolous people, who are bending their whole force and the force of nations on trifles, and these are baptized with every grand and holy name, remaining, of course, totally inadequate to occupy any mind; and so sceptics are made. A true soul will disdain to be moved except by what natively commands it, though it should go sad and solitary in search of its